Congratulations if you managed to plough all the way through part one and my droning on about ‘systems approaches’ and such-like. To steal a far more succinct phrase from Andrew, and hence save you the bother of reading it: in short, I was making the point that if you want to make a car truly light, you can’t just bolt lightness on after the fact – it has to be engineered in from the outset.
Nonetheless, once you have ensured the right systems and structures are in place to make sure you’re going about creating this thing in a way that should make it inherently, intrinsically light, there remains an important role to be played by lightweight components too, which is what I’m focusing on today; and, like last time, it is in relation to the Alpine A110 whose engineering team it was my happy lot to lead.
At its launch, the company revealed quite a lot about some of the cooler weight-saving details on the car. Here’s a link to a video from 2017, where I am being interviewed by a very youthful-looking Mr Prosser – little did he or I know that one day he would be reaching into his own trouser pocket to put a deposit down on the wares I was dutifully hawking that day.
